Why is there abandonware?

I was thinking about the thousands of old games and applications that are no longer available for sale, and thus (almost) impossible to legally play anymore, but still going to be copyrighted for a century or so, and how much that sucks.

And I realized that while yes, copyright laws are ridiculous, there's no reason why this should even happen in the first place. If you own the copyright to a game or program, surely you'd want to sell copies of it for as long as you can. Even if there are only a dozen buyers around the world, $50 is better than $0, right? There are distributors that specialize in this stuff, like gog.com, and I'm sure more would appear if there was a market, so it should be as easy as signing a contract allowing redistribution in exchange for 50% of the revenue or whatever. And with emulators and other tools, getting old programs to work on new platforms shouldn't be too hard.

So the possibilities are

• The cost of selling a product is actually much higher than that and makes it not worth the trouble
  
• The copyright owners are not aware that they own the copyright or that they could sell it
  
• The copyright is "orphaned", i.e. nobody knows exactly who owns it
  
• Third party agreements that prevent it, i.e. some kind of exclusivity contract for licensed console games that is still active

(and then there are some cases like Microsoft not selling older Windowses or Offices so they can sell the newer ones, but I'm talking about defunct product lines)

So which one is it? Is there any way we could incentivize the process?

Submitted June 05, 2016 at 09:36PM by user_82650 http://ift.tt/1XumHfN via TikTokTikk